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Friday, November 2, 2012

Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG): Rosetta Stone’s resilience pays off…almost

Google Inc(NASDAQ:GOOG)
has been making billions through their system of AdWords, and it has obviously
been very irksome to many companies. The search giant has been making a good
amount of money, and quite soundly, through their AdWords. The issue has been
dragged to court by many small companies who have pressed lawsuits against the
search giant by saying that the company should not be allowed to do what they
are doing, which is, essentially, keying advertisements to their own names. The
issue has been taken to court on the grounds that these are protected
trademarks. However, there are very few cases, which seem to have survived in
favor of these companies. Rosetta Stone Inc(NYSE:RST)’s case is one of the more
resilient ones.

GEICO’s lawsuit against
Google had gone for trials, but the case was one by the latter in the middle of
the trial itself. There have been other trademark owners, who have decided to
fight Google on this issue, but most of them could not go on with the lawsuit,
and more often than not, they ended up dropping the cases. Examples of
companies who have had to do this are, Rescuecom, American Airlines, and other
such companies. The Rosetta Stone lawsuit, however, is a special one. The
company has managed to cling on and fight till a settlement was reached between
the two companies, the terms of which have gone undisclosed.

The first lawsuit had
come from Rosetta Stone to Google in 2009. The former had argued that the
consumers were being mislead, since the ad keyed to its name was leading them
to opt for services and goods which were fakes. The software being bought by
the consumers were of below average quality. The case was lost to them after a
federal court ruling, but after appeals, it was revived, and finally settled
yesterday.

After a muddled ruling
from the appeals court, the case was sent to the lower courts after the
evidence of an internal study in 2004, of Google, showed that the confusion
amongst people using the search engine was actually present. However, since
Google can fight it out, as it has shown in the past, the case was finally
settled upon, and both Rosetta Stone and Google decided to come together to
combat the problem of piracy of trademarks, instead of fighting with one
another.